1. Field of the Invention
This invention pertains in general to electronic messaging and in particular to enforcing compliance policies on electronic messages delivered via a network such as the Internet.
2. Description of the Related Art
Before the introduction of e-mail, business users relied on two forms of communication—the phone and the business letter. The former was momentary and casual, the latter was retained as a business record and was considered formal. E-mail has blurred those two communication requirements into one tool—people use it both formally and casually, but it is retained for an indefinite time period (typically years) depending on how an enterprise's Information Technology (IT) system has been set up.
Enterprises are now searching for a way to deal with the problem of separating communications that constitute business records from the general ‘chatter’ of e-mail. Such business records must be retained in a manner that reflects the business processes to which the content relates. However, there are few, if any, ways to automate the process of filtering and storing business-related e-mails.
A further problem with current e-mail systems is that messages are just simple text strings. When a user writes a message, it is formed into the first e-mail, but may then go on to be included in many other e-mails during its lifetime. This results in many copies of the same, user-authored, message in different, unrelated, mail “snapshots.” Storing multiple copies of the same messages is inefficient and undesirable. Moreover, enforcing a retention policy, access rights, security or any other property onto messages is nearly impossible, as the content cannot be tracked or logged given all of its separate instances in the mail system. As a result, heavy use of email makes it extremely difficult for a company or other enterprise to store the message content or to determine how the messages have transited the messaging system. Therefore, the enterprise will have difficulty attempting to achieve compliance with internal or government-mandated regulations relating to business records.
Therefore, there is a need in the art for an electronic messaging system that eases the task of separating business records from general e-mail “chatter” and enforces compliance policies on the messages.